Are you young? Then you should be more beautiful at twenty-five, at thirty, at thirty-five, than you are now. Not with the budding bloom of first youth, that is as evanescent as it is exquisite. What a pity that it is beauty’s only dower to so many American women. They waste it, lose it, then wilt and wither. I want you so to feed the sources of life to-day that you may grow, not wither; that you may bloom, not fade, into the perfect flower of womanhood. Terpsichore is a sad sight to me; not because Terpsichore dances, for dancing in itself may be as innocent as a bird’s flying; not because she loves beautiful attire, for exquisite dress is a feminine fine art, as meet for a woman as the flower’s tint, or the bird’s plumage. I sigh at the sight of my pretty Terpsichore, because the first bloom of her exquisite youth is being exhaled and lost forever in a feverish, false atmosphere of being. Something of delicate sensibility, something of unconscious innocence, something of freshness of feeling, of purity of soul is wasted with the fresh young bloom of her cheeks in the midnight revel, lengthened into morning; wasted in the heated dance, in the indigestible feast, in the wild, unhealthy excitement through which she whirls night alter night. Terpsichore, in her tattered tarletan dress, creeping to bed in the gray morning, after having danced all night, is a sad sight to see to any one who can see her as she is. Terpsichore’s mother would be a sadder sight still, if she were not a vexatious one. She brought back from Europe the notion, which so many of our countrywomen think it fine to bring, that “full dress” is necessarily next to no dress. She tells you, in a supreme tone, that admits no denial, that you would not be admitted into the drawing-room of a court in Europe unless in full dress, viz., semi-nakedness. She would be nothing, if not European in style. Thus, night after night, this mother of grown-up daughters and sons appears in crowded assemblies in attire that would befit in outline a child of eight years of age. If we venture to meet her _ipse dixit_ on European style, with the assurance of the Princess Helena, Ghika, Dora D’Istria, one of the most learned and beautiful women of this world, that the conventional society dress of Europe is more immodest than any she saw while traveling over the mountains and valleys of the East, she will tell you that Princess Ghika “is not an authority on dress in Paris,” which is doubtless true.